Buy Local: Let Hunch Take Care of You

Chris Dixon’s taste-grapher Hunch rolled out its socially-improved recommendation feed about a week ago. It took the nerd-centric company 978 words to explain the changes, and yeah, there were a lot.

Hunch’s recommendations feed layers a social network on top of Hunch’s machine-powered taste graph. The feed looks like a Tumblr, with photos and video of things you might like spilling down the page with comments appended by whoever shared them. A Tumblr-esque menu at the top of the page lets you submit recommendations by category or URL; a dropdown menu asks for tags and comments.

This new feature is also Tumblr-y: “You can ‘re-recommend’ something which appears in your feed, which will in turn push it out to your own followers, creating a potential viral wave of recommendations.”

With new Hunch feed, you’ll notice a quick onboarding process that asks you for some broad areas in which you’d like to receive recommendations and suggests some users to follow in those categories.

The new feed still feels beta-y, but it’s usable and useful even though the userbase is sparse. On the flip side, that means you early adopters have a shot at being highlighted as recommended users and grabbing desirable usernames. Act now! Then take the survey and tell them how to fix their UI.

(Betabeat pro-tip: Stick to music if you’re worried about being tempted to buy things.)

“We’ll be working to improve the integration of recommendations which appear in the feed vs. recommendations which you’ll find in the browse sections of Hunch. This will include harmonizing how the result pages look. In fact, there’s a lot we’ll be continuing to refine and improve based on your feedback,” Hunch said on its blog.

And if you’re feeling less serendipitous, you can always go straight to “Browse” and page through Hunch’s picks for you by category. Every click makes Hunch smarter.

Buy Local highlights apps, websites and hacks recently released by New Yorkers either as start-ups or side projects. Made something like that? Email us or get @ us on Twitter.

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